Chaos Paradox Definition

 ”If you would be a real seeker after truth, 

you must at least once in your life doubt, as far as possible, all things.”

René Descartes, Discours de la Méthode, 1637

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    Paradox and contrast allow definition. Light to dark. Life to death.  A human life is a short thing. We have these tools, these minds, that reach for understanding. Animals do not ponder their existence and read history books or tell their horoscopes, they only live. What would be the point of a creature such as ourselves, if only to be a small spark of life passing fleetingly in the great yawning expanse of time? We are but a matchstick, bursting with light and life and then swept away by a wind too strong to stand against. Who ever cared about a lost match anyway, unless it was your very last one?
    When one severs their ties with their viewpoint on reality, they are left with nothing. No truth, no beliefs, no bias, they are a vacuum of receptivity for impulses. Nothing is true, it all passes through them, irrelevant. They step back and gaze at the vast Nothing and find True Will in the stillness. 
    "The Great Work is the uniting of opposites. It may mean the uniting of the soul with God, of the microcosm with the macrocosm, of the female with the male, of the ego with the non-ego." Aleister Crowley
    Assuming, of course, that the deprogramming of their mind didn't shatter them into a million pieces, each as certifiably insane as the last. Yes, perhaps it will destroy me, but maybe in the ashes I'll find center. From this vantage point one may pick and manipulate anything their Will desires because everything is permitted when nothing is true. No laws, no rules, no fixed ideas or concepts. The Self contracts and sheds its exterior.  
   "A day will come you will see a darkness so total that Nature never knows it anywhere on Earth at any time, in any place! Only the human soul can know it. And it goes on forever. And I pray that when you finally can no longer escape from it, when you realize it is all around you, that your logic and your reason give you some strength against it." Anne Rice
   I have not solved the great question, it can not be solved, the point of the Great Will is in seeking it. What is on the other side can not be known until that gate is passed through. The great mysteries can not be understood so long as we are beholden to them - as we must be until death.
    It can be difficult to do magic when you can see that all of the things which have been pinned to it are actually separate from its essence. But the essence of magic can not be grasped, it is elusive. It is defined by mystery and mystery is undefinable. So use these attachments, this lore, tools, these correspondences, as a medium through which magic is accessible, understandable.

Invocation

We walk the old paths with awe, in hallowed space, in trance, enthralled.
We circle 'round the central fire, asking fate shine on our just desires.
Through veil of night our will is sent, and the stars, silent, witness our intent. 

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at www.ann-gb.deviantart.com

   Invocation, from the latin 'invocare' meaning "to call on, to give" Which may be in the form of a supplication or prayer, a spell, conjuration, or possession.
   This is different from evocation, which is the conjuration and communication with an entity through a medium such as the voice / mind of the conjurer, or a containing object like a totem. With invocation you invite an entity into your own body for a union. This is seen in Wicca in the Charge of the Goddess which begins describing the words of the goddess, "For hers is the ecstasy of the spirit," and moves to speaking as the mouth of the goddess, "Hear now the words of the Star Goddess." Finally by the final passages the speaker is one with the goddess herself, saying "I who am the beauty of the green earth."  Doreen Valiente, adapted by Starhawk.
   To invite an entity into my own body, I had to first investigate and identify my core beliefs. There is no grander feat in spiritual matters, than to attempt to define the divine. God, spirit, soul, a sense of awe. The eternal grail quest, the wide circle around one self. I believe that divinity is a personal experience, unique to every person who reaches for it.
 
   "Each god brings its own madness. To know the god - to be accepted by it - to feel its mysteries, well you have to let that madness wash over you, and through you."... "We forge bonds with the gods we choose and with the gods which choose us." Phil Hine
   What I discovered is this; be someone that the gods would approve of and wish to commune with. The key to invocation is to find the feeling within you that you wish bestowed by this entity. It hardly matters if there is truly a being somewhere in the cosmos called Ares and he is a god of war, and all battle is under his watchful eye. When people cry out and run at each other, weapon in hand. When they are locked in battle the spirit, the presence, of war is with them. When you need to work a spell to defeat an enemy you take your dagger or beat a drum, cry out, bleed, whatever it takes to invoke that presence of war within you, within your space. These and ten thousand other moments like it are the same, the feelings are reached for are the same; an understood concept. Beyond being a concept, existing of itself in every place and time. There will be war long after anyone, any culture, gives it a name and a mythology.

"...I saw Her worship as being collected together from the minds of men and women, the very best of ideas of which men and women were capable. That was the function for which the Goddess existed; that was the spirit from which she drew her vitality. The trick was not to reject a certain image of her, but to realize what her image meant. To extract from that image the very best in my own soul." Anne Rice, Pandora